I have been on Mastodon for a little over two years, and until a week or so ago, I didn’t really get it. Most of my social media usage and posting has been on LinkedIn, which I use because I know the people there in real life and care about what is happening to them. I post there because I also think they care about what’s going on with me. So, I have groomed my feed down to mostly those people. I thought I could replicate this on Mastodon, but that didn’t work.

The problem is that I know very few people on Mastodon in real life. I followed those that I could find, but I don’t keep looking for them, and Mastodon doesn’t suggest people I might know. I tried to augment this with hashtags, but I didn’t choose many and they happen to have very low traffic. So, my feed is dominated by a few people that I don’t know mostly posting about their lives and not on topics I care about.

But I recently decided to follow more higher traffic hashtags and that has made a big difference. It makes me think that Mastodon is somewhere between LinkedIn and Reddit. Reddit is about the topics. LinkedIn is about the people. Mastodon is something in-between.

Here’s how I use it now:

1. I post to trial blog posts. This blog post was a toot a few days ago.
2. I don’t link back here much. It might not be the best way to use social media, but I like the idea of content that’s fit for the media. My favorite toots are self-contained, so that’s what I mostly try to do. You can find this blog in my profile.
3. I follow people that I see a few times. I figure they will mostly post on the topic.
4. I follow people that star or boost me because I feel like they are probably also using Mastodon similar to how I use it.
5. I mute accounts that post too much to hashtags. Mostly, these are businesses, not people.
6. I have a few mute words to keep political news out of my feed.

This has made Mastodon more useful for me. I end up with a feed that is mostly about topics that I want to write about, and I post things I am thinking about. It’s supporting my aspirations to write more, and so I’ll keep using it this way for now.